Akademik

(tur.DUK.un)

n.

A boneless turkey that is stuffed with a boneless duck that is stuffed with a boneless chicken.

Opinions about our holiday turducken feast broke down along largely gender lines.

The male demographic appeared to be quite pleased with our 15-pound Cajun delicacy — a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken.

"Now, that's a quality hunk of fowl" said one male person, digging in at our Christmas dinner table. "I mean, a quality hunk of three fowl."

However, the female demographic was decidedly less enthused.

"I didn't want to say anything at the dinner table," said one young female person afterward. "But it made me want to throw up."

— Jim Kershner, "Why one meat when you can have three?," Spokesman Review (Spokane, WA), January 4, 2003

K-Paul's is closed on Thanksgiving but the occasion does not pass uncelebrated. The main attraction at dinner this week is called "turducken." To make it, Prudhomme stuffs a boneless chicken with a reddish sausage stuffing; the stuffed chicken is then stuffed into a boneless duck with cornbread stuffing; finally, the chicken and duck are stuffed into a boneless turkey with greenish oyster stuffing. When sliced, you have three birds and a rainbow of stuffings.

— Charles Michener and Linda R. Prout, "Glorious Food: The New American Cooking," Newsweek, November 29, 1982

When subscriber Brian Cole told me about the turducken, I thought he was kidding. Sure, his e-mail arrived in my inbox at 12:11 AM on April 2nd, but he could have sent it on April Fool's Day. I suspected fowl play. However, some quick investigative journalism assured me that this Frankenbird was no canard and that, in fact, it was invented — I want to say "manufactured" — by none other than the famous chef Paul Prudhomme: http://www.chefpaul.com/turducken.html back in the early 80s. Unfortunately, why he felt the need to construct a kind of Russian doll in meat remains a mystery. (At least Chef Paul isn't responsible for the pigturducken (1997) which is — you guessed it — a turducken stuffed inside a pig, the resonant symbolism of which I won't get into here.)